Socialthing is a lifestreaming service that aggregates 6 other services namely LiveJournal, Pownce, Vimeo, Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter. You can post a message from Socialthing to any or all of the latter services. The lifestreaming service is similar to Friendfeed, but while FF allows you to comment or discuss an entry, Socialthing does not. It is simply a streaming service with a clean and easy-to-use interface.
However, there is already an existing service out there with 16 (!) social services integrated, including LinkedIn, Bebo, Plaxo, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, and other international services. The service is HelloTxt. It has a mobile version that looks neat to your iPhone or any WAP phones and a Facebook application. We have previously covered HelloTxt here.
Socialthing will have to add more integrated services and features to its offering to make it a more compelling aggregation app.
[If you want to try out the service, send us an email for an invite. One invite left.]
Filed under: Web Application | Tagged: HelloTxt, Socialthing
Hey there Carlo, just wanted to put up a couple of distinguishing factors up here:
1. Socialthing! doesn’t have conversation within our site like FriendFeed does, however, you ARE able to reply directly to Twitter and Pownce posts, and soon other kinds of content like photos and videos. Rather than keeping the conversation within our site and splintering it off from the content originator, we prefer to push it back out.
2. HelloTxt and Socialthing! are nothing alike. HelloTxt only pushes status messages out to services, and doesn’t aggregate anything back in. Socialthing!, however, brings in all of the things your friends are doing on other services into one interface. Also, HelloTxt is using scraping technology, and is also collecting the passwords for your social networking accounts over a non-secured HTTP connection. Scraping is bad because it could lead to your account on that service getting suspended, as well as the fact that they could easily get shut down via an IP lock-off and then the service would lose its value altogether. Socialthing!, on the other hand uses the APIs to authenticate, and whereas we do ask for passwords in some instances, we’re using them over a secured HTTP connection, so you have less to worry about.
We will be adding services very quickly here, and will have a lot more usefulness coming. Stay tuned! Anyone that wants to sign up for Socialthing!, go ahead and click here for an automatic invite code…
Hey Matt, on item 1, it would be good to keep a history of items posted by users via Socialthing. The plans for photos and videos sound promising. That would be a cool function.
On item 2. HelloTxt does have a an aggregation service called Timeline. Thanks for pointing out the issue of security. If this is the case, you’ll be in better position feedbackwise in the longer term.
Surely we’ll be tracking updates of Socialthing!
Indiekid said on March 22nd: “We will be adding services very quickly here”. That was over 3 months ago. They’ve taken out LiveJournal and added Del.icio.us and Digg. Not exactly what I would call “adding services very quickly”. Where is Jaiku? Where is LinkedIn? Where is Tumblr? Plurk? Numpa? Come on guys, at this pace you’ll be obsolete before you even started!